Jennifer Martelli discusses her debut collection of poetry, The Uncanny Valley, growing up saturated with images of the Madonna, and her experience of motherhood first as a daughter and now as a mother.

Fan fiction writers, rejoice: the future of TV is yours. Yoda-like lizard extracts water from sand without moving a muscle. Holy relics, bacteria, and the Ivy League reveal how to be a better liar. Why modern science rejected modernism. Hankering for a camel or zebra-horse? Try Missouri.

If you can grope your way through late James, you’ll find you have moved out of the Victorian era into the modern and, beyond that, into what we have come to refer to as the postmodern. Over at the Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen makes the argument that the difficult, late-period Henry James was “too […]

For NPR, Annalisa Quinn reviews Eimear McBride’s new novel, The Lesser Bohemians. “For McBride’s characters … love encroaches into and alters the inner self,” Quinn writes. “The Lesser Bohemians is a love story, yes, but it is really an electric and beautiful account of how the walls of self shift and buckle and are rebuilt.”

Poet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.

Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa’s work, often triggered in the same image. “Insects pierce green through the orchard,” she writes in “Like a Cloud.” “The sky has countless scars. The skin of the earth emerges there, burning like a cloud.” For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel details the renewed interest in Sagawa Chika, […]

At the Guardian, novelist Julian Barnes shares his experiences developing a taste for art during his childhood, and how modernism worked to change his early impressions of what art could be. In addition, he offers insight as to how modernist art has come to influence his work, as well as the works of Flaubert and […]

“…Fiction and literary nonfiction put you in the mind of character—in her psychological and spiritual “truths”—as she thinks and perceives and interprets and misinterprets and doubts and desires and decides.”

“I’m exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.” Novelist, theorist, historian and blog-girl, Kate Zambreno gives up a meaty, definitive interview.

Hello

Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, poetry, and comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny).